WASHINGTON – Three years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the terrorist threat to the United States and its allies remains as serious as ever, despite an intense, multipronged assault on al-Qaida, according to senior U.S. officials, diplomats and counterterrorism experts.

That assault has badly wounded al-Qaida’s central leadership, including many of the men who were behind the deaths of nearly 3,000 people in New York, Washington and Pennsylvania.

But it’s failed to stem the spread of Osama bin Laden’s ideology and methods, which have been adopted by violent Islamic groups worldwide. Those groups are even harder to track, and capable of great damage, the officials and experts said.

“The threat of al-Qaida-related terrorism remains as great as ever. But the nature of the threat has changed,” a United Nations panel said in a report issued in late August.

President Bush, who’s made the “war on terrorism” the core of his re-election campaign, appeared to waver last week on how it’s proceeding. He said in a television interview Monday that “I don’t think you can win” the war. The remark quickly drew criticism and he modified it, saying the next day: “Make no mistake about it: We are winning and we will win.”

The threat from al-Qaida itself, the organization bin Laden built with fellow veterans of Afghanistan’s wars, probably has waned, and the group is battered and frayed, experts said. But the threat from the new “franchise” groups is growing rapidly and may even have surpassed it. It’s fueled by widespread resentment in the Muslim world of U.S. policies, including the invasion of Iraq and unblinking support for Israel.

“Even with al-Qaida waning, the larger terrorist threat from radical Islamists is not,” senior CIA official Paul Pillar, a former head of the agency’s Counter-Terrorist Center, wrote recently.

“Al-Qaida still has the capacity to inflict lethal damage, but the key challenges for current counter-terrorism efforts are not as much al-Qaida as what will follow al-Qaida,” he wrote.

For Americans worried about new terrorist attacks, that picture is mixed, too.

Al-Qaida is still aiming for another catastrophic strike against the United States, counterterrorism officials say. But with the group’s remaining leaders on the run and U.S. defenses increased, such a strike seems less certain than it did three years ago.

Yet attacks on civilian targets by spinoff terrorist groups are virtually a weekly occurrence worldwide, from the downing of two Russian jetliners in August, which killed 90 people, to bombings in Turkey, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.

The train bombings March 11 in Madrid, Spain, which killed 191 people, were carried out by a group whose members have no known organizational link to al-Qaida, the U.N. report noted. “None had been to Afghanistan,” where al-Qaida’s terrorist training camps were, it said.

The metamorphosis of Islamic terrorism is all the more remarkable because it comes despite a relentless, U.S.-led campaign against al-Qaida that’s achieved numerous successes, though many of its stated goals remain frustratingly unmet.

Bin Laden, whom Bush once vowed to capture “dead or alive,” remains at large along with his deputy, Ayman al Zawahri, probably in remote tribal areas along the Afghan-Pakistan border.

But bin Laden’s ability to manage al-Qaida “has been degraded,” and he and his comrades spend a lot of time and effort worrying about their security, said a senior U.S. counterterrorism official, who agreed to an interview on condition of anonymity.

Roughly 70 percent of al-Qaida’s leadership has been killed or captured since the Sept. 11 attacks, the Bush administration says, although it hasn’t published details to back up the assertion. Between 2,000 and 4,000 al-Qaida-linked individuals have been detained in dozens of countries.

Interestingly, military actions have played a relatively small part in the successes of the post-Sept. 11 campaign against terrorists. While the war began with U.S. troops and their Afghan allies ousting the Taliban regime in Afghanistan in late 2001, much of al-Qaida’s leadership escaped that onslaught to Pakistan.

Since then, the counterterrorism successes largely have been the result of multi-nation cooperation from police and intelligence services.

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Detainee No. 1 is Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who conceived the Sept. 11 attacks as one of bin Laden’s generals and was seized by Pakistani forces and CIA operatives in March 2003 outside Islamabad.

“It’s impossible to replace people like KSM,” an operational genius who’d lived in the United States, knew its culture and spoke fluent English, the senior U.S. counterterrorism official said.

Other major figures captured, mainly in Pakistan, include Abu Zubaydah, a top operational leader; Sept. 11 plotter Ramzi Binalshibh; Tawfiq Attash Khallad and Abd al Rahim al Nashiri, who played central roles in the October 2000 attack on the USS Cole, which killed 17 sailors; and Abu Eisa al Hindi, a senior al-Qaida member who was detained in the United Kingdom in August.

In Southeast Asia, Riduan Isamuddin, also known as “Hambali” – the head of the al-Qaida-linked Jemaah Islamiyah, which was responsible for the October 2002 Bali bombings – was captured in August 2003.

“The al-Qaida of 9-11 has been decimated,” said Cofer Black, the State Department’s counterterrorism coordinator. “If one were to reverse positions, it would have been a story of catastrophic defeat.”

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A shift in attitudes by the Pakistani and Saudi Arabian governments has been crucial to the effort. Their more aggressive actions followed a series of deadly suicide attacks in Saudi Arabia and two assassination attempts against President Pervez Musharraf in Pakistan.

The worried Saudi monarchy has moved to choke off funding for al-Qaida, shutting down terrorist-linked foundations and enacting new regulations on charitable donations.

But even in the area of terrorism financing, success is mixed. The U.N. report found that curbs on terrorist financing, including 5-year-old sanctions on al-Qaida and the Taliban, have failed to keep up with the changing face of bin Laden-inspired terrorism. The U.N. list of entities associated with al-Qaida and the Taliban needs to be updated, though the report notes, “It will always be difficult to design, let alone enforce, sanctions against diverse groups of individuals who are not in one location, who can adopt different identities, and who need no special equipment to launch their attacks.”

The report also noted that “Al-Qaida operations are not characterized by high cost.” It said the 1998 attacks on U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania cost less than $50,000, while the Cole attack cost less than $10,000, as did the Madrid bombings.

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U.S. officials say the stepped-up efforts by Pakistan and Saudi Arabia still don’t go far enough because of domestic sensitivities. Pakistan, for instance, only recently has begun aggressive operations against foreign militants in the tribal areas along its Afghan border and moved against remnants of the Taliban, which its own security services helped create, said a senior State Department official, who asked not to be identified.

Still, Pakistani authorities say they’ve arrested more than 60 people in the last six weeks. The most important are Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, a Tanzanian indicted in the 1998 embassy bombings, and Mohammed Naeem Noor Khan, a Pakistani computer engineer who apparently operated a communications link between al-Qaida’s leadership-in-hiding and operatives worldwide.

Computer files seized in the arrests of Ghailani and Khan alerted U.S. authorities to al-Qaida’s earlier surveillance of five financial bastions in Washington, D.C., New York City and New Jersey. And they led authorities to al Hindi, also known as Dhiren Barot. Bin Laden sent the senior operative to case targets in the United States in early 2001. A British court has charged al Hindi with possessing surveillance plans of the New York Stock Exchange, International Monetary Fund headquarters and other sites.

A senior White House official, who also asked not to be named, called the transcontinental chain of arrests “a strategic success against al-Qaida.”

But some analysts said the arrests demonstrated that al-Qaida remained surprisingly cohesive despite three years of battering, and had graduated new leaders to compensate for the loss of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

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Looked at from al-Qaida’s viewpoint, said Bruce Hoffman of Rand Corp., which advises the Pentagon on counterterrorism, the group has endured an unprecedented onslaught from the United States – and survived.

“Do we know of any organization in the world that could be functioning after three-quarters of its leadership (was eliminated)?” he asked. “Even though we’ve damaged or weakened them, this is a very determined … implacable enemy.”

Whether the new leaders are as capable as the old remains in dispute.

Analysts said they weren’t entirely certain why al-Qaida hadn’t conducted another attack on U.S. soil, even one on the relatively modest scale of a suicide bombing at a shopping mall or hotel.

They suspect it’s because the group has greater difficulty sneaking its operatives into the United States and would expend precious resources only for a catastrophic attack intended to shock America and reinforce al-Qaida’s image worldwide.

“They set the bar pretty high three years ago,” the senior counterterrorism official said.

But many analysts said the real threat now came not from al-Qaida itself, but from the spread of bin Laden’s ideology to small, amorphous cells that were hard for intelligence agencies and police forces to track.

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They noted that the group of North Africans who carried out the Madrid bombings weren’t seen as a major threat by Spanish police and that they obtained explosive materials from a quarry and used cheap cellular phones to detonate their bombs.

Such groups pop up, with little or no notice, in Western Europe, north and east Africa and southeast Asia. They have barely known names – such as the Islamic Great Eastern Raiders Front in Turkey and Algeria’s Salafist Group for Preaching and Combat – or no names at all.

“It’s sort of like Whack-A-Mole at the beach,” the senior counterterrorism official said, referring to the popular arcade game.

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That poses real threats, as the United States begins remaking its intelligence services in response to the Sept. 11 attacks.

In the future, CIA official Pillar wrote, suspects may go unnoticed “not because data on analysts’ screens is misinterpreted, but because they will never appear on those screens in the first place.”

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Bin Laden has proved masterful at harnessing resentment at the United States across the Muslim world, resentment that’s grown since the invasion of Iraq last year, and he’s adept at using modern technology, particularly the Internet.

Retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a national security expert, predicts that as al-Qaida’s appeal grows in the Muslim world, it’ll morph again. While not abandoning terrorism, it’ll grow into a political movement that will influence and ultimately could take over governments in the Middle East, he said.

“The history of insurgents is that they start out as terrorists, and they become governments,” Killebrew said. That’s “an eventuality that the West has got to get prepared to deal with.”

The brunt of the future fight against terrorism could fall on partners overseas, whose long-term commitment is fragile, officials said.

“The real measure of success is how the world maintains a commitment to fight this fight after bin Laden and Zawahri are gone,” the senior counterterrorism official said.

The independent commission that studied the Sept. 11 attacks made the same point.

“The first enemy is weakened, but continues to pose a grave threat,” its report said, referring to al-Qaida. “The second enemy is gathering, and will menace Americans and American interests long after Osama bin Laden and his cohorts are killed or captured.”

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(c) 2004, Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services.

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GRAPHIC (from KRT Graphics, 202-383-6064): 20040902 TERROR ALQAIDA

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